Seer of Egypt

by Pauline Gedge

  Thothhotep did not laugh. Slaking her thirst, she replaced the cup on the desk and pulled a stool near to Huy. “The King has already turned his attention to you, Master, if only briefly,” she reminded him as she sank onto the stool. “He must have instructed Royal Treasurer Sobekhotep to continue the grant of gold that his father began. Merenra told me yesterday that the regular amount due at the start of the spring months had arrived.”

  Huy did not know whether to feel glad or threatened by the news. “Will he go to war, I wonder? All the signs point to a rapid advance on Rethennu. Will he take the army further? Is Prince Amunhotep safe from him in Mitanni? Or does Thothmes feel so secure now that the Double Crown is on his head that he will leave his older brother alone?” Bemused, he ran a hand through his unbound hair. Heby’s letter had arrived very early in the day and as yet Huy had not been to the bathhouse.

  “The question you really want answered is, will the King require a Seeing from you as he passes the town?” Thothhotep pointed out. “He doubtless remembers his father’s victories that you foretold. But he won’t stop here and send for you, will he?”

  Huy met his scribe’s steady gaze. “No, he won’t. He will never offer me his hand. He’s afraid that if he does, I’ll know the truth of his dream for certain. He might send one of his generals, though, or even Wesersatet. Would that be safe for him?” Thothhotep did not respond. Her hand went to her palette, and Huy shook his head. “No, I won’t dictate an answer to Heby today. Seshemnefer arrived last night. He wants to discuss with me what crops to sow on the arouras at Ta-she and those I own west of Hut-herib, and Anab is already nagging me about our garden here.” He got up.

  “Huy, why don’t you go with Seshemnefer when he returns to Ta-she?” Thothhotep said. “The Rekhet left you a beautiful house on the edge of the lake, and the surroundings will be bursting with fresh green growth. You need a rest.”

  “Perhaps I do,” Huy admitted, “but I have no desire to be anywhere near the palace at Mi-wer, to be accessible to the nobles and officials stationed there, even if Thothmes does go east.” He placed both palms flat on the surface of the desk and leaned over them. “I want the next nine years to pass quickly,” he said harshly. “I want to bury myself here until our new King dies. I feel the pain of Ma’at’s wounding, Thothhotep. I have seen it. Let Thothmes stand in the Judgment Hall like every ordinary citizen so that whoever inherits the Horus Throne will begin to heal her! I suppose that I am speaking treason,” he went on more quietly. “So be it. File Heby’s letter. I’m going to the bathhouse with Tetiankh.”

  By the second week of Tybi, the flood water had drained into the soil and back into the confines of the river’s banks. The peasants could be seen standing in the naked, silt-clogged fields. The maze of canals used to feed water to the coming crops had been sealed against any outflow as over the coming months the level of the river would gradually begin to drop. Rumours of a projected military campaign were at last confirmed. His Majesty would take his troops east at the beginning of the following month, Mekhir. But by then Huy no longer cared whether or not Thothmes went to war. On the twenty-eighth day of Tybi a letter from Amunnefer arrived. Huy, enjoying the cool breeze, was in the garden talking to Anab over baskets of bedding plants when Thothhotep brought him the scroll. Seeing Amunnefer’s seal impression in the wax, Huy handed it back to her. “It will be his estimates for the cost of tending the poppy arouras this year,” he said. “Make a note of them yourself, Thothhotep, and file them. You can give me the amount of gold later.”

  She had taken the scroll and gone away and Huy had dismissed it from his mind, but almost immediately Amunmose came hurrying over the grass, his expression solemn. “Master, you are needed in the office,” he told Huy. “Thothhotep asks that you join her at once.” An intimation of what was to come brushed Huy, the merest feather touch of dread. He wanted to go on standing in the sunlight with his kilt moving gently against his thighs and the fresh green smell of the new plants over which Anab was bending in his nostrils. Amunmose was walking back to the house, and after a moment Huy followed him reluctantly. It will not be about disease in the opium or trouble among the peasants, he knew instinctively. This is something much worse.

  Thothhotep was standing in the middle of the office floor with the scroll in both hands, a stricken look on her face. You have broken the discipline of a good scribe, Thothhotep, Huy thought as he rounded the doorway. You have shown your master a reaction to the contents of a letter before being asked to give one. He halted, too tense to go to his chair. “Read it to me,” he said.

  She swallowed. “Master, I—”

  “Read it!”

  She fumbled to unroll the scroll, her throat working again, her tongue moving briefly over dry lips. “There is no greeting,” she began, her voice uneven. She cleared her throat, shot him an agonized glance, and went on:

  Know, then, that my wife and your old friend, Anuket, is dead. On the second day of Tybi she became restless, refusing to eat and calling for wine. I did not worry over her request. For a long time she had taken no wine at all, and when I saw her gradually return to full health I did not forbid her a cup of shedeh during feasts on our estate or when visiting friends. She herself never asked for more. But on that day of Tybi she shut herself up in her apartments and would let no one enter. I was forced to leave her in the evening to attend to affairs in my administrative office adjoining the old palace. When I returned, she had gone, taking with her only a cloak. She had refused an escort from my household guard. I began to search for her in the company of my soldiers, and just before dawn I found her. I cannot tell you of her state except to say that she was lying naked in the shadows of the Street of the Beer Houses and she was dead. Her body even now lies in the House of the Dead here in Weset. My soldiers and the police of Weset have scoured the city for any hint of her attackers, but apart from a beer-house owner who remembers a woman of aristocratic speech drinking alone in a corner of his establishment, we are empty-handed. Nebamun, the King’s Overseer of the Desert west of the city, is searching there, but I sense that neither he nor Weset’s police will find anything or anyone. Something happened within Anuket, something terrible. Was this the culmination of what you foresaw in her future, Huy? She will be placed in my tomb in the second week of Pharmuthi. Until then, I have closed the doors of my house to everyone, and this is the final letter I will write. I have already written to Anuket’s brother and sister at Iunu. By my own hand, the fourth day of Tybi, year one of the King, Amunnefer, Governor.

  “It takes about three weeks to travel the miles between Weset and the Delta, sailing against the current,” Thothhotep said lamely as the scroll rolled closed in her hand with a polite rustle. “The period of mourning—”

  “Leave me.” Thothhotep laid the scroll on the desk without looking at him and quietly went out. The period of mourning has already run for twenty-six days. In another forty-four days it will be over, and Anuket will be entombed during Pharmuthi, the twelfth day of Pharmuthi if my calculations are correct. If I’m to attend the funeral, I ought to leave here during the first week of the month before. That’s next month, Mekhir, and Mekhir begins in three days, so I should warn Merenra to prepare for a long journey and then a week at least in Weset with Amunnefer. It would be a good idea to travel south in a flotilla with Thothmes and Ishat and Nasha. After all, Iunu is on the way … A sudden pain brought him to his senses and, looking down, he saw that he was holding an earring smeared with blood. His necklet on which hung the sa amulet the Rekhet had made for him lay on the floor at his feet, together with the thin hoop of bracelet he had been wearing. His ear was throbbing. Stupidly, in a daze, he fingered his lobe and his hand came away wet. I must have torn off my earring without unscrewing it, he thought, watching it fall to lie on the small pile of his other jewellery. What a foolish thing to do! Nevertheless, he had already pulled his braid forward automatically and was tugging at the frog ornament holding it tied. His eyes followed its swift descent t
o the floor with mild interest.

  Then all at once reality deluged him. Anuket was dead. Anuket was murdered. Strange men, wild men, had … had done what? Dragged her from the beer house and raped and beaten her? Stabbed her? Flung her from one to the other and then strangled her? “Amunnefer did not say,” he said loudly, “but surely these were base creatures living without Ma’at. They will be found eventually and the King will give her justice.” No, they will not be found, something inside him whispered back. Anuket could not escape the fate her name demanded, the fate Anubis showed me, the fate she herself could not have imagined that day long ago in her father’s herb room when she told me that her name meant “to embrace.” She had been sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by a clutter of leaves, twigs, and flowers, in the act of twisting the stems of two white water lilies together, as he entered. The room had been redolent, as always, with the aromas of thyme, mint, dill, spices, and flowers, odours that always brought her tiny face to mind when they assailed his nostrils. On that day she had settled a wreath of yellow daisies around his neck and he had suddenly, irrevocably, fallen in love with her. She had been named after an ancient water goddess who embraced the fields with the Inundation, a minor deity but a symbol of chastity, of purity. Over the long passage of the hentis she had slowly become a goddess of lust and obscenity. “No totem of Anuket stands in my bedroom!” her namesake had told Huy vehemently. “I shall try to embrace all that is good. I have never felt lust, but if I ever do, I shall not allow it to engulf me. Even if I feel it!”

  Huy, now standing swaying in his office, unaware that he had begun to dig his fingers into his hair, could hear her voice, could see that dainty oval face with its wide brows drawn together in a frown of seriousness, the graceful, vulnerable hands stilled on the wet and quivering petals of the waxen lilies. He had kissed the top of her head, he remembered, had put his mouth against the black, sweet-smelling sheen of her hair, lost to all else but the throb of desire within him. “You felt it in the end, and you forgot how you told me that you would never let it engulf you,” he went on aloud to the niches full of scrolls, the tangled shadows of shrubbery on the tiled floor, his distorted reflection on the polished surface of the desk. “You lived your name, Anuket. Anuket!”

  The memories were pouring into his mind with all the force of a desert wind, and he let them come. Running into the passage, he stumbled for the stairs, his unbound hair streaming down his naked back. Briefly he was aware of his body servant’s shocked expression as he fled towards his bedchamber. “Bring me poppy, a lot of poppy,” he croaked as Tetiankh backed against the painted wall of the upper passage. “Keep everyone away from me for the rest of the day, Tetiankh—and hurry up! I refuse to suffer this pain!” Falling into his room, he saw his long censer lying beside Khenti-kheti’s shrine. A few fragrant ashes remained in its bowl. Knocking them out onto one trembling palm, he knelt, ground them into his scalp, and began to weep, not for the licentious, wine-soaked woman he had encountered at Thothmes’ wedding but for the lovely child who had made him her youthful prisoner, both of them briefly fresh and innocent before the slow tide of maturity with its subtle corruption flowed in to taint their hearts.

  He knew, as he drank the poppy a worried Tetiankh had brought, that he was being cowardly, and he did not care. Lying on his couch, he let the blessed opium blunt his grief and then cocoon it. He slept while the household filled with the news the scroll had brought, the word spreading quickly and dying as his loyal servants heard and then closed their mouths. It was still dark when he woke to the sound of gentle breathing, and, sitting up, he saw Tetiankh on his pallet inside the door instead of outside it. He is concerned for me, Huy thought as he lay down again. I suppose that in the morning I must endure the mute expressions of sympathy on the faces of all I meet, and for their kindness I will be grateful. I must dictate a letter to Thothmes and Nasha, and to Amunnefer. He loved Anuket very much, but will there be a tiny portion of relief mingled with his tears of loss? And you, Ishat. In spite of your happiness with Thothmes, will you allow yourself a moment of purely feminine spite at her shameful end? Searching himself, Huy found a bed of resigned acceptance under the spate of memories. She tried to avert the fate her name decreed, his thoughts ran on. It was a valiant effort, but it failed. Or did it?

  Suddenly alert, he sat up again, settling his pillow at his back and pulling the sheet up over his waist. The attempt was not her own, he knew with the clarity of certainty. O Atum, how merciless you are in the pursuit of your mysterious will! My punishment for standing mute before the King was the attack on Ishat, but you did more, did you not, implacable one? For a brief time you took Anuket’s destiny and laid it on Ishat. You did not care about Amunnefer’s hope as he saw his wife become sober. You disregarded Thothmes’ anguish when he believed that Ishat would die. All that mattered to you was my humiliation, the conviction that my visions had become false. I failed you, and you retaliated with the callousness of a cruel and selfish taskmaster. Did Anuket have a choice when she woke on the morning of the second of Tybi and felt again the craving she supposed she had conquered? Do the visions, once told, remove the freedom of choice from the petitioner, fix unchangeably a fate that might have been subject to the will of those who extend their hands to me if their future had remained unknown? Is that how you steer Egypt, by using the visions you send me to force the unfolding of this country’s fate? Yet I had a choice when I sat on that accursed stool with the courtiers watching me like vultures, and I made the wrong one. Your anger was great and your judgment swift, Holy One. In agreeing to help his mother nurture young Prince Amunhotep towards ultimate godhead, did I make the right decision and thus Anuket’s true destiny was returned to her?

  All at once Huy realized that he had finally been able to give shape to the puzzle that had occasionally dogged him since the earliest days of his gift, namely, why was it that a handful of those for whom he had Seen, or healed by Anubis’s prescriptions, returned later with relatives suffering a similar malady, of either body or event? “Because I foresaw the future of the wrong person,” he said aloud, forgetting that Tetiankh was asleep in the room. The servant sighed. Huy heard the soft movement of his sheet as he turned over. Then why did I not See the original petitioner’s correct future? Huy’s thoughts ground on.

  There was something wrong with his reasoning, he knew, something that should be obvious, perhaps even familiar, but the flaw in his argument eluded him. The soporific effect of the poppy had worn off, leaving him aching for a lost love, for the comfort of Ishat’s presence, withdrawn from him years ago, for the cheerfully ignorant child he had been before Sennefer’s throwing stick and the permanent scar it had caused, now hidden by his hair. His sadness grew, encompassing Thothmes, Nasha, and Amunnefer, all of them in mourning as he was, but he found that he could not cry anymore for Anuket. She had been Atum’s gaming piece. Would the weighing of her heart against Ma’at’s feather in the Judgment Hall be favourable because of it? Huy wanted more poppy, but he fought the hunger, not because the Princess Mutemwia had cautioned him but because, now that the first agony of loss had passed, he would not insult the memories any further. He would honour the young Anuket he had known best. Pain came with that resolve. Lying down, he stared into the dimness above him while the remainder of the night wore away.

  In the morning, he dictated a letter of condolence to Amunnefer and a more informal missive to Thothmes and Nasha:

  I have been reliving our youth together. Neither aging nor death can erase those magical years. The child in me will always be gliding through the marshes on hot summer afternoons while you, Thothmes, try without success to bring down a duck, and you, Nasha, loll indolently on your cushions with a mug of beer in your hand and tease both of us while the guard yawns and the reeds around the skiff rattle gently against each other. Somewhere deep inside me I still stand on Nakht’s raft in the torchlight while the guests drink and chatter and Anuket weaves between them in bare feet, her slender body sw
aying to the rhythm of Nakht’s musicians, a garland to place around my neck in her outstretched hands. I am sending gold with this letter, a contribution towards the endowment of the tomb Amunnefer will doubtless share with her when it is time for the weighing of his heart. I shall not travel to Weset for her funeral, Thothmes. Forgive me. The rumours of war have been confirmed, and in the event that the King should wish to consult me before marching east, I should remain here. If he does not summon me on his own behalf, he may do so for Wesersatet or one of the generals. I love you both very much. Come to see me when you return to Iunu. Kiss Ishat for me.

  Huy stopped pacing and looked down at Thothhotep. “Finish with the usual dating and I will sign it. Do you think I’m wrong to stay home, Thothhotep?”

  She glanced up at him, brush in hand, a smudge of ink across her nose. “You have your own reasons for not making the journey to Weset,” she retorted. “I must confess, I’m surprised, though. The Lady Anuket was one of your oldest friends.” Her head went down again over the papyrus uncurled across the palette on her thighs.

  I cannot speak of how I could not bear to see Anuket’s bandaged body standing in its coffin beside the tomb’s entrance, Huy thought, going to his chair. To imagine the mourners wailing in their blue sheaths is dismal enough, and the funerary priest, the Kher-heb, approaching her corpse holding the Ur-hekau, the rod used as part of the ceremony to reopen Anuket’s mouth and eyes. Those beautiful eyes, Huy remembered with a pang, and that mouth full of an ingenuous invitation. No. If my mind would present her to me as she was when I last saw her, with the pouches of dissipation under her eyes, her slim lines blurred by too much flesh, an ill-fitting wig on her bald head, I could endure the ritual that will leave her in the darkness of dank rock. But that image is ephemeral, that image has no substance beside the girl I worshipped.